The Bride of Texas (43 page)

Later on — by then Kapsa was a drill sergeant in the newly formed Thirteenth U.S. Army Regiment under Sherman — Fircut did show up again. Nothing had happened to him. It turned out that the depilatory effect of the tonic acted like a fertilizer: in the long run, it actually did promote the growth of hair
.

Salek, determined either to get his five hundred dollars back or to punch Fircut in the nose, wound up doing neither. In fact he invested more money — this time in the new firm of Fircut, Sanders, & Co., which arranged for the reburial of fallen heroes in special coffins offered in a range of prices. But Cup never saw a single dividend. By then he was a Union soldier
.

Shortly after that night with the lightning, he divorced Vlasta
.

“Okay,” Shake admitted, “I wasn’t the one who almost took General Polk prisoner, but I was there when he just skinned out of being taken prisoner by Colonel Shryock, who was sent to us when Colonel O’Sell was taken by General Polk when he reported under his command, as ordered, with his entire brigade.”

“You’ve got it all haywire,” said Javorsky.

“All I’m doing is faithfully describing the renowned battle of Perryville. If anything was haywire, that was,” said Shake. “For instance, how would you explain the fact that next day, when the main battle broke out, Lincoln’s Rifles, which were part of the Twenty-fourth Illinois in General Gilbert’s corps, fought with the Eighty-seventh Indiana in General McCook’s corps?”

“How do you explain it?” asked Fisher.

“I can’t.”

“I can,” said Houska. “You simply scrammed, banner and all, and ran into the Indiana troops, who stopped you from scramming any farther.”

“You didn’t hear me right,” said Shake. “The twelve of us were the only heroic ones of the original eighty-two men in Lincoln’s Slavonic Rifles, and —”

“Including you, right?” said Javorsky. “You and your armour.”

“I admit I was driven to heroism by cowardice,” said Shake. “But the mix-up at Perryville was partly the fault of our three commanders, partly the weather conditions, and mainly the powder!”

“Your powder was damp?” said Houska. “I thought you were saying how dry it was.”

“I mean the powder, the yellow dust that covered us,” said Shake, “because the weather was so dry.”

The second day, when Cheatham and Buckner and their veterans came tearing out of the woods with their Rebel yells and woke up the desperately thirsty rookies in General McCook’s two divisions, they raised clouds of dusty earth from the ground that turned both the blue and the grey uniforms an indistinguishable greyish yellow. The units got mixed up as individual soldiers moved in and out of the dust clouds, and shortly General Terrill was the first casualty, and no one knew if he died a hero’s death or was accidentally shot when some scared rookie fired at a dusty shadow. But Sheridan, who at that time was an artillery commander, not a cavalryman, recognized that the forward ranks of the Confederate troops, mixed in with the Union rookies, were driving McCook’s two divisions off the battlefield and towards defeat, so he aimed his cannon at the rear lines of the Rebel army and executed a textbook artillery assault from the flank, where they least expected it. He added to the confusion but he also prevented a rout.

“In a coach far away from the slaughter, General Buell had no idea what was happening,” Shake continued, “because, in addition to the powdery dust, there were something like bubbles forming on the battlefield that didn’t let any sound through.”

“Bubbles? Of what?” Zinkule wondered.

“Hot air,” said Houska.

“I don’t know,” said Shake. “One minute you’re deafened by Rebel yells, then you take a step and they look like a chorus offish. Buell and his coach were right in the middle of one of those bubbles, waiting for the fighting to start, but it had already been going on for an hour and he couldn’t hear it. He was confused when his messengers described the start of the operation to him.”

Fourteen hundred from both armies died in the battle, and later on almost six thousand more died in field hospitals and infirmaries — legless, armless, gangrene-ridden, thirsty, racked with pain. Around the campfire, the horrors turned into comedy. It was the reverse of the chromotypes printed in ladies’ magazines at the beginning of the war, reducing the horrors of the slaughter to one or two symbolic soldiers splayed out picturesquely on emerald-green grass.

Shake said, “In the course of the battle, the Lincoln’s Rifles took up a position in the ruins of a farmhouse, and we waited for the right moment to deliver a decisive blow against the enemy. The farmer and his family were trembling with fear in the cellar, but they had a supply of well water, and because they were loyal to the Union they sent their daughter up to bring us water and she ended up staying and watching the battle. So we finally slaked our thirst as we waited for the right moment to attack. Then we gradually got really thirsty.”

“You said you already slaked it,” said Houska.

“He means figuratively speaking,” said Javorsky.

“Exactly,” said Shake. “The farmer was prepared for that too. He sent his son up with a jug; the kid put it beside the trap door and went back down into the cellar. So we worked on getting rid of that kind of thirst, and towards evening —”

“What about the girl? I’ll bet you tried to seduce her into drinking with you too,” said Houska with a frown.

“Not into drinking with us,” said Shake, “and anyway, we got nowhere. It was the fighting she was interested in. Just when we thought the moment to attack had come, a fresh brigade headed by Colonel O’Sell emerged from a cloud of dust. We cheered and Colonel O’Sell walked over to Geza Mihalotzy and asked him if he was in contact with the enemy. Mihalotzy didn’t want to admit that so far the only contact we had had was with the civilians in the basement — and they were friendly — so he told O’Sell that we hadn’t been able to identify the enemy clearly in the raging battle. At that moment one of those sound bubbles rolled over to us, a cloud of dust was blown away, and on a little rise ahead of us was a tall officer in a dark uniform, scouring the valley with a pair of field-glasses, though he couldn’t have seen much. ‘Isn’t that General Terrill?’ Colonel O’Sell asked. In his embarrassment, Geza Mihalotzy ran his finger inside his collar and raised his chin. Colonel O’Sell took this for a nod and hurried over to the officer in the dark uniform. Just then the bubble burst and we could hear O’Sell as clear as a bell. “General, sir, I’m here on your orders with an infantry brigade.’ The general looked him up and down, which was unusual, given the battle situation, then asked him which brigade he meant. ‘The second brigade of the First Division of General Gilbert’s corps,’ replied Colonel O’Sell. ‘I await specific orders regarding our position in the field.’ The general looked him over again, apparently taken aback, and then said, ‘There must be a mistake. You, colonel, are my prisoner.’ And then we saw O’Sell sheepishly unbuckling his sword and handing it to the general. It was General Polk. With all that dust on his uniform, it looked blue.”

“Why didn’t you go to O’Sell’s rescue?” asked Fisher.

“We intended to start firing but we might have hit O’Sell. So we had to stand by helpless as Polk escorted him to the nearest bubble.”

“Why didn’t you launch this attack you keep talking about?” Houska asked.

“It didn’t seem like the right moment,” said Shake. “When the right moment finally came, General Polk was gone with his prisoner, Colonel O’Sell.”

More cannon boomed in the distance. Shake inverted the canteen with the word WODA carved on it, ran his finger around the inside of the neck, and licked off the last few drops. He sighed. “The situation got more and more complicated,” he said. “It was getting on towards dusk, on the north hillside of the valley a greenish sun crept along the jagged horizon, the moon rose in the south and it —”

“— had polka dots,” Stejskal prompted him.

“Damn near,” said Shake. “It was kind of a turquoise colour, with strange orange blotches on it. Bubbles were rolling about the battlefield and it turned out that they didn’t just block out sound, they could hold it as well. When a bubble burst, it sometimes let loose an order shouted half an hour earlier at the other end of the battlefield, which just made things more confusing. One of the bubbles released some choice bits of profanity uttered by General Braxton Bragg, and then we could hear General Polk interrupting him: ‘General Bragg, expressions like that will not be tolerated on my battlefield!’ ”

“Admit it,” said Houska, “your thirst was so quenched that you slept right through the battle and dreamed up the bubbles.”

“It’s extraordinary that some of you don’t believe me,” said Shake. “In this war anything is possible.”

They sat around the campfire palavering in Czech while farther away, at a respectful distance, was a circle of Negroes they had gathered on their march. They looked like impoverished scarecrows. Tattered shirts were draped over dark sweaty torsos, muscular legs were barely covered by what had originally been
trousers. But they were grinning into the fire, for they were free. Then two Negroes got up and moved closer to the fire. They had obviously been listening to the conversation. Their clothes seemed in better repair than the rest and one of them had an embroidered design near the collar of his shirt, stained though it was with the mud and dirt of North Carolina. To the sergeant it looked like a little Moravian dove design. Was it the booze? No, he was quite sober.

“A blessed good evening to you,” said the first Negro, in Czech. The sergeant spun around to face the man, whose plump lips framed a shiny white smile. He closed his eyes and opened them again: the little Moravian doves were still there on the grubby shirt.

“Are you Czech?” Kapsa asked, in the same language.

“Oh no, I’m Moravian,” the man replied, in a Moravian dialect. “So’s Breta here,” he added, pointing to his companion.

“Massa was Moravian,” he explained, “and so was his missus.”

“What’s your name?”

“MacHane,” said the Negro. “He taught us to read and write, too.”

The sergeant was moved by this living evidence of a compatriot’s destiny in the depths of the Carolinas, amid the smouldering turpentine forests. He invited the two men over to the fire. Stejskal gave them some roast meat and they downed it hungrily. The story or legend, or whatever it was, emerged gradually. It must have been the truth; after all, both men spoke Czech. Their mother had died young; Massa MacHane had bought them as kids. He only had five slaves, all male, and they worked on his steam-powered sawmill on the Charleston River. He bought the two little boys for his kind missus, for the couple had no children of their own.

“What was her name?”

“Ruzena. She died five years ago, a year before the war started.”

“And where is your massa?”

“He had to join up. He’s a colonel with Massa General Braxton Bragg.”

The name was still confusing him. “You know how to write?”

They both nodded. He handed them a pencil and a notebook. “Write down your massa’s name, his whole name.”

The Negro wrote, in a large schoolboy’s hand,
Jindrich Machane
. Then he said aloud, “Ma-khah-nee-yeh. But everybody called him MacHane. So we did too. Sunday he’d read the Bible to us. Massa was a Moravian Brother.”

An odd story to come across here, in deepest North Carolina. Massa MacHane had been born here. Maybe his father came from the old country, the Negroes weren’t sure. Now he was the enemy in Braxton Bragg’s corps out there somewhere. Colonel Henry MacHane. Kapsa glanced at the Negroes gnawing away at the generous hunks of plundered meat roasted over a campfire. Freedom. The respectful circle of black men hung back in the black darkness, singing pianissimo:

Ursula’s face emerged from the darkness. Freedom. No von Hanzlitscheks.

Sucking on a cold meerschaum pipe, Shake was finishing his wild dream: “Clouds of dust that started out yellowish
brown turned blue when the spotted moon rose over the battlefield, and suddenly out of one of those clouds came a swarm of attacking soldiers in pale green uniforms. It was an optical illusion, of course, but we recognized them from their hats. Not even the zouaves from New York wore anything like that, and they’d wear practically anything. No, these were Rebels. So Colonel Shryock, who had replaced Colonel O’Sell when he got taken prisoner, gave the order to fire, and all of us Lincoln’s Rifles obeyed to the last man.”

“How big was that jug?” asked Javorsky, but Shake went on unperturbed.

“The Rebs took cover behind a low stone wall dividing two fields and returned our fire. Then all at once an officer in a dark general’s uniform emerged from a dust cloud on our right and looked around, and when he saw Colonel Shryock hiding behind a wayside cross —”

“Aren’t you getting this mixed up with the Hussite Wars?” asked Stejskal. “A wayside cross in Perryville?”

“The farmer was from Moravia,” Shake retorted calmly. “The general walked over to Colonel Shryock behind the wayside cross — it was a pillar depicting the agony of Christ on the cross — and yelled, ‘What’s going on here, colonel? Can’t you see you’re firing on your own men?’ Colonel Shryock was startled, uncertain, and glanced over at the low stone wall and the unmistakable hats showing behind it. ‘I do not think, general, that we are mistaken here,’ he reported in an official tone. ‘I have no doubt whatsoever that these soldiers are indeed the enemy!’ ”

“Sounds like a book,” said Houska.

“That’s because Shake tells stories straight out of storybooks,” said Javorsky.

Shake just shrugged. “ ‘Enemy soldiers!’ the general shouted, annoyed. ‘What nonsense! Colonel, hold your fire, at once!
And what is your name?’ Beside me Pepik Dvoracek jumped up and tried to alert Colonel Shryock to something, but he and the English language didn’t get along too well, because he never had much use for it tapping beer at Slavik’s Tavern. ‘Sir, Sir,’ Pepik shouted, ‘He … he.…’ ‘What do you want to tell him, Pepik?’ I asked, but he was so eager to speak that he couldn’t get it out. ‘Sir! He … sir!’ As Pepik was stammering away, I heard Colonel Shryock say, ‘Colonel Shryock, Eighty-seventh Indiana Regiment. And might I ask who you are, general?’ ‘Sir! Sir!’ Pepik Dvoracek kept saying. The general looked at the Lincoln’s Rifles and scowled. He rode over to Colonel Shryock, shook his fist in the colonel’s face, and declared, ‘You don’t know me, but you will!’ He turned his horse, did a slow gallop along our battle position, calling, ‘Hold your fire! Hold your fire!’ We obeyed and, oddly enough, so did the fellows in the hats behind the wall. ‘Sir! Sir!’ Pepik kept trying, but still couldn’t get out what he wanted to say. The general slowly vanished in a dust cloud, with a neigh and the sound of galloping hoofs. And Pepik Dvoracek gave up and shouted in Czech at Colonel Shryock, ‘Colonel, sir! That was General Polk. I know him because once, before the war, he dropped in for a drink at Slavik’s.’ ”